Trailmakers – Co-creating heritage through AI

Trailmakers is an AI-supported creative programme that enables students to co-create a new layer of Ipswich's heritage.

Developed by Urban Tech Creative in collaboration with Hannah Houghton and working alongside Wolsey 550, the project builds on the concept of a co-created heritage trail. Drawing on Urban Tech Creative's experience with digital storytelling platforms such as Dock Stories, Trailmakers adapts this approach into a structured, classroom-based and AI-assisted process.

At its core, Trailmakers is not an open creative tool, but a guided educational framework. Students work collaboratively as a class to research a specific Ipswich Blue Plaque figure and develop a single, shared character outcome. Through discussion and teacher-led input, students shape how that character is represented visually and narratively.

AI is used within this process as a creative translation tool. Students contribute ideas, descriptive language and interpretation, while teachers input prompts into the platform to generate images. This ensures the technology is used in a controlled, accessible and age-appropriate way, while still allowing students to see how their ideas influence visual outcomes.

Each class produces a defined set of outputs, including a character portrait, a related object and a full character representation. These are not standalone exercises. They form part of a wider public-facing project.

The final outputs are integrated into a Google Maps-based heritage trail, where each participating school contributes one character linked to a real location in Ipswich. At each stop, visitors can access a student-created interpretation of a historical figure, including a short biography and an animated talking character accessed via QR code.

This establishes a clear connection between classroom activity and public experience. Students are not working on hypothetical tasks. Their work becomes part of a live trail that can be experienced by residents and visitors, fostering a sense of ownership, pride and connection to place.

The project also explores the role of AI in education as a guided creative partner. Rather than positioning AI as an answer engine, Trailmakers uses it to demonstrate how ideas, language and interpretation can be translated into visual form, reinforcing the importance of clarity, collaboration and critical thinking.

Trailmakers is led by Wolsey 550 and supported by The Ipswich Society, Sizewell Creative, Packaged Living, The Historic Towns Trust and Ipswich Maritime Trust.

The programme is designed as a scalable model that links education, place and digital infrastructure, allowing future cohorts to expand and evolve the trail over time.

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